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Chapter 1

A Question of Significance

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

—Edmund Burke

You may not be thinking about politics. Make no mistake: politics is thinking about you. How it is thinking about you, and how you in turn should be thinking about politics, may hold the key to finally understanding the underlying dynamics that make up the political world we humans have created, and are destined to live in.

Theoretically, politics is supposed to answer collective needs to organize people into orderly societies so everyone benefits. But how politics organizes people is often captive to personal idiosyncrasies that may benefit the politician more than the people.

Taking a step deeper into political theory, and stripping down politics to its basic elements, we find that politics is a potential powerhouse of control by the few over the many. It is this reality that should concern us. However, it may not if we see politics as merely something other people do, or ignore the fact that politics forms the very social environment within which we humans struggle to survive. In other words, politics is directly tied to raw, human self-preservation.

But who sees it this way? However, when we do, we realize that politics cannot be held solely in the hands of “other” people. It must be held in our hands for we are the ones lessened in value and harmed when politics turns against us.

But what does politics turning against us really mean? What does it look like?

What can we do about it?

We can do little if we the people do not become active, informed participants. In other words, we can’t leave politics to politicians.

Politics can do wonderful things in the name of everything good, but can do terrible things—also in the name of everything good.

When politics rises to create a better life for its people, or sinks to exploit the very people it swears to help, looking to political theory, politicians, or political explanations is a dead end. If we want answers that make sense, and answers we the people of America can work with, we have to examine realities of the human mind like, for example, the impulse to control other people.

Politics is more than an ideal scenario for controlling people; it is the only scenario for the overcontrolling mind whereby one can grab the four perks of political control: unlimited power, unlimited riches, influence, and the chance to be adored by an admiring public—and hold them for a lifetime. Where else can you get that? Having one or more of these perks, e.g., if you are wealthy, is no guarantee that you will have all four—for as long as you live.

Then there is this: The human need to control people can be a very serious psychological problem. Not only is it overlooked by mental health professionals and the public, its pathological side is underrated, if not ignored. We can’t look to politics for explaining this. We need a hand’s-on, practical, no-nonsense study of the political mind that clears out academic clutter to give we the people of America a solid foundation of understanding that will make significant differences in how we see politicians and the politics they create.

There’s a caveat: If we focus on the mind of the politician, politics has to make room for a study of the mind: psychology.

That may strike you as good or bad, depending on how you view either one. But including them together? That may take a bit of getting used to. Nonetheless, if we want clear answers to what is actually happening to American politics today, like it or not, we’ll have to examine politics via the political mind with a psychology. That’s where this book comes in.

Let me explain.

America, as a constitutional or representative republic, is collapsing under the weight of a political juggernaut relentless in its quest to control you and me and transform the values America once stood for. Sadly, too many Americans are unaware, or don’t care. Even if they are aware, they may not appreciate the serious nature of this threat assuming that its machinations are just reflections of politics as usual that Americans will correct with the next election.

Political improvements of any kind, of course, will help, but they can’t stop this threat from pulling America into chaos. The deepest subterranean forces driving today’s political conflicts are not political; they are psychological (in the mind). Personalities of politicians, and the people who support them, play far more significant roles in America’s destiny than the bad laws, capricious judicial decisions, or harmful regulations political personalities create. If we Americans care enough to save our republic from itself, we’ll have to rethink our political world in a new context of psychological realities to clearly understand how and why today’s America is collapsing.

This raises an interesting question: Does today’s psychology have the wherewithal to expose bad politics, and the personalities driving it? It does not; therefore, we need a psychology that does—precisely what this book is offering.

To co-opt a popular political slogan, I believe this is our best shot to truly make America great again and keep it great for generations. What do we have to lose? Politics is failing us because it is ignoring the very political personalities that are making sure America will transform itself into something it never was.

The “forked tongue” of politics (saying one thing while intending something else) is this threat’s political weapon of choice. However, there is more that should concern us. We have to fully understand how this threat’s supercharged propaganda machine, organized around its own invented, illegitimate psychology, carefully shapes, and then controls, how we think until all Americans will, someday, be too helpless to resist.

I’m speaking here of the early signs of political tyranny. Unfortunately, such signs are easily overlooked, especially if the tyranny sets the stage, as it were, by penetrating the public mind to sensitize it to tyrannical lies and false promises while rendering it insensitive to fact and common sense.

Today, signs of tyranny are all around us. There is the politician who is driven to do anything by any means necessary to scratch his way to the top of the political heap.

We hear promises that are, on their face, ridiculous. Facts are twisted into sophisticated lies that make sense only to the apathetic or incurious mind. We find people speaking in emotional tirades rejecting reason, and reacting defensively to anyone who disagrees. “Comedians” have abandoned humor to become political shock and entertainment shills. Political or economic programs to solve problems only create more problems (e.g., welfare or government health care). Resources are taken from vital institutions (e.g., the military) so unnecessary, but politically favored institutions can proliferate. More people are dependent on government. Then there is the most destructive sign of tyranny: government targeting its most needy and disadvantaged citizens for exploitation.

Suffering people are psychologically at risk for believing any political lie that empathizes with their suffering. They will ignore what they are told to ignore, believe what they are told to believe, and vote as they are told to vote—if government perks keep coming. Yet with so many signs of political trickery swirling about us, some Americans are convinced that this threat is the only possible answer to America’s personal, economic, social, and political problems.

On the other hand, none of this should surprise us. History tells us that the tyrant’s goal is never to improve the people’s quality of life; it is always to improve the tyrant’s quality of life and lives of his closest, obedient, followers.

Societies that have collapsed (e.g., Ancient Athens or Rome) decayed over time from within without its citizens realizing what was actually happening. Historians cite many causes, politics being one. Is America next?

This is not an idle question. Our thinking patterns are under siege. Many Americans no longer sense America as exceptional. Even well-intentioned Americans are surrendering their liberties and freedoms so a powerful few can enjoy their personal liberties and freedoms in protected opulence.

We see this political phenomenon festering in today’s Cuba, Venezuela, China, North Korea, Russia, most Middle Eastern countries, countries run by warlords of various configurations of political tyranny, and it is spreading in some European countries.

The tyrannical mind has an “advantage” over us: compulsive drives to control anyone who can be controlled. This has nothing to do with politics unless this psychological drive is operating within politics—which it so often is because controlling people with political power is the most intoxicating form of pathological control. Since politics is the ideal, and most sought after social institution for luring the overcontrolling personality, there is no question that a psychology has a role to play in politics.

Looking to a psychology for answers within our political world is a new wrinkle in how we think of politics. Nonetheless, failing to understand the psychological dynamics of political personalities driving political decisions is precisely what has brought America to where it is today. With this in mind, one of the goals of this book is to empower patriotic Americans by enlightening them with a new, hand’s-on psychology to better understand themselves so they, in turn, can better understand the founding principles that motivated the first Americans who freed their country from England’s tyrannical rule.

However, unlike England’s openly tyrannical methods during the eighteenth century, today’s political threat is working quietly under public radar. Stirring masses of clueless followers to despise America is Phase I in its quest to dominate America. That phase is, for the most part, complete. The goal of Phase II is to keep Americans confused and bewildered by creating division and discord, moral decay, cultural rot, and unresolved, political conflicts; that’s where we are today. Phase III is on the near political horizon, i.e., when this threat shows itself for what it is, and we’re helpless to resist.

Public disinterest is fertile ground for a tyranny to spring up and eventually blanket America with its political venom. At first it may present as just another political movement with the best of intentions. When cracks in “noble causes” begin to appear, we dismiss them as political errors, “changing times,” “pains of progress,” effects of normal, cultural shifts, or blame it on the other political party. Maybe we feel it’s none of our concern; personal priorities come first. Then there are political scandals and conflicts that leave us confused. Let’s not forget fellow citizens overwhelmed with child care, personal, or financial issues that demand all of their attention. No wonder most of us live our lives as if politics is on autopilot, i.e., our interest is not required.

America has always tolerated a measure of public disinterest, and still maintain its original, founding purpose. Now, however, growing disinterest has serious consequences when so much misunderstanding and public apathy lie between those who love America and those who hate everything it stands for.

For America’s haters, viewing our republic’s collapse is a welcome event because of America’s perceived illegitimacy, arrogance, racism, and global exploitation. America must be taken down to join the global union as just another country that does not offend other countries with ridiculous claims that it is somehow exceptional.

Underlying all of the above is a curious shift in America’s collective thinking that has traded respect for the power of the individual for the power of government, as if we the people of America are no longer participants in determining our political futures, and are nothing more than annoying political roadblocks in the way of an ever-expanding government.

How did this shift in thinking happen? What exactly is its underlying nature? How does this political threat turn our thinking against us? Why didn’t Americans identify it before it became a threat? But the most telling question is this: What we can do about it?

What can we do if merely talking about this threat as a threat labels us as politically incorrect, or worse? What options are there when so many of us view it as a final solution to all of America’s problems? What can we do if turning against America’s heritage and values is looked upon as patriotic, responsible, or moral?

More to the point, what can we do when the real danger to our future quality of life lies in how and why this threat’s highly refined, group-think psychology is presently contaminating the very cognitive processes we depend on for selecting political candidates, or how we interpret political events? I ask you: Are your political views really your own or someone else’s views that have been figuratively pounded into your head with each daily, well-orchestrated serving of political propaganda?

It’s all about changing perceptions, but perceptions are formed around the quality of cognitive patterns we live by. Once well established after birth, we’re stuck with them for life. We can’t choose or change these patterns. Some are not good for us, or for the people we affect with them. Here’s the problem: Cognitive patterns that are not good for us are embedded in psychological dysfunction—the very fertile, psychological ground this tyranny is drawn to, has chosen to operate in, and build its strategies upon.

Our psychological problems, no matter how seemingly insignificant they may be to us, or appear to others, are cues for a tyranny to move in to re-interpret our psychological liabilities as potential opportunities to exploit so we eventually believe everything the tyranny wants us to believe. Once that is accomplished, we become part of an ever-expanding political power base that marches to one tune to smother all opposition so our mind-shaping masterminds can establish a one-party government with unlimited power forever shielded against the values that once made America great.

Without a psychology, we’ll never explain the above, much less do anything significant to stop it. On the other hand, guided by a psychology, we can explain the above and answer questions we couldn’t ask before. For example:

How is the mind so easily drawn to nonsense and repelled by fact? Why would anyone work so hard to control how I think?

What kinds of people impose their personal beliefs, values, and attitudes upon other people’s personal beliefs, values, and attitudes with little regard for their welfare?

How is quality of our life being diminished without our having a say?

Why is the natural act of thinking for ourselves so threatening to some politicians?

These questions, and others like them, will be answered in this book to your satisfaction. But first we have to think differently about psychology. While reading this book, you will think differently because its contents reflect a true science of the mind designed for you and around you.

Here’s a question that might make you think differently: Is today’s psychology art or science? Most mental health professionals reluctantly admit that it’s art. What’s the difference? The art of psychology is built upon a soft, conceptual foundation of political and cultural trends, opinions, educated guesses, theories, isolated/stand-alone facts, and changing public values. The science of psychology, on the other hand, is built upon a solid, conceptual “rock” of practical conclusions formed around psychobiological realities that never change.

However, thinking about the human mind like we think of today’s art, i.e., open to any interpretation, is not a new phenomenon. Down through the ages, educated guesses, government decrees, kings, tyrants, corrupt politicians, ideologies, theologies, philosophies, orthodoxies have treated issues of the mind as if the opinion rules—as long as the opinion came from a perceived authority.

Sugarcoating humanity’s most destructive political ideologies is a power-hungry politician’s privately sworn duty. How then do we the people penetrate insulated minds of tyrants living out unsatisfied obsessions on the hunt for power and riches without a psychology guiding us? How else do we address the human suffering bad politics causes, and what this suffering represents? Without a psychology, how do we interpret seductive messages from the tyrannical mind painting glorious pictures of a perfect world that will somehow magically appear in the future to satisfy everyone’s yearnings? Politics, by itself, will never explain why this perfect world, so artfully rendered, is always spoken of as somewhere in the future, never in the present. Bottom line: Politics, even if it could, would never expose its failures, hidden corruptions and compromised personalities. So, it’s up to us.

Lacking information, we’ve settled on a position that only creates more political conflict: Good politics is what we agree with; bad politics is what we disagree with.

We’re not doing much better trying to figure out which politician is good or bad for America, especially when we’re told that all possess a superior intellect, unquestioned integrity, high moral standing, vast knowledge, enlightened expertise in every field of study, and are beyond reproach. We’re expected to believe that politicians put us first. Their lives are guided by every honest trait imaginable while holding to every positive ideal. Collective misperceptions like these permit the tyrannical personality to meld into politics unnoticed. And America is the worse for it.

Political tyrants will always deny their tyrannical calling. The untold suffering they cause is also denied; for them, public suffering brings exploitable opportunities. Victims seek relief; any politician who promises relief today is in a position to mold minds into blindly accepting lifelong states of victimhood tomorrow. Helpless but willing masses also serve as a social foundation of “inferiors” for political elites to proudly compare themselves to, and stand above, as self-anointed “superiors” who are born to lead and, therefore, deserve to be idolized by those born to follow. In other words, we the people of America are inferior, and will always be inferior.

Let’s, for a moment, accept that argument. We’re still left with this inconvenient truth: If we investigate our self-anointed, political “superiors” with a science of psychology, we’d find them to be nothing more than self-centered, mental and emotional inferiors who, like common, white-collar criminals, exploit anyone within reach for personal gain. However, there is a difference: The politician is better positioned with resources and influence to avoid exposure and penalties.

America’s Founders had a sense of the above when they gave us the political powers to choose, or reject, people who represent us. The Founders were already living under the political yoke of an officially proclaimed superior English political system enforced by a truly superior military. So instead of looking up to a future, king-like elite to rule their new America, The Founders looked laterally to each other to find that eternal key to good politics and government: the virtuous, informed, and patriotic citizen.

Building a political system around, by and for the good citizen is the only formula for building good governments. When political power is firmly held in the hands of the people, the good among them rise to sense their responsibilities for becoming protective guardians of good government while honoring their God-given rights to improve political outcomes as they experience them day-to-day. They’re also free to satisfy natural yearnings for liberty and independence by maximizing individual potential—as they see fit. Sadly, disempowering the individual is the path America has chosen and is now on.

How much power a government is willing to allow its citizens is measured by how many citizens are benefitting versus how many are suffering—a telling criterion for judging any political system. Unfortunately, the idea that ultimate political power must be held by the people has been eroding in America for over a century, fed by the skillfully manufactured, emotionally seductive lie that big government—the bigger the better—is the only government worth living under.

But here’s the good news: The right psychology, with the right information, when joined to good government, can muster formidable challenges to big-government/anti-individual ideologies.

However, this may sound too good to be true, if not wildly idealistic. It will if you believe the mind is too mysteries for clear, practical answers, if you are convinced that psychology has no role in your life, or if you feel that psychology, even as a science, will never make a difference in politics.

Nonetheless, a science of psychology is an information source unlike any other in that it defines you and others around you, guides you through life, and defines your quality of life with words you can trust and live by.

The science of psychology I am offering in this book welcomes your interest. It also welcomes your criticism and rewards your patience for examining it. Psychology is confusing and rudderless without clear guidelines. It is also, for the most part, irrelevant if we the people of America are not active participants in it.

A science of psychology:

 Is for you. Today’s psychology is for academics and theoreticians who have established a status quo closed to criticism. This has freed mental health professionals to treat us with endless ruminations about the human psyche as if it is a mysterious art form off limits to anyone not officially licensed to ponder it, ergo why today’s psychology rarely gives us practical conclusions. The science of psychology, on the other hand, treats opinions, theories, and educated guesses as first steps toward reaching conclusions, but not any conclusions. Its conclusions carry practical information the public already knows is true, suspects is true, or just makes sense. Its conclusions not only lead to predictable, observable outcomes, they work each time, every time. Today’s mental health field only recognizes psychological symptoms that most people agree are obviously in need of its professional intervention (therapy, management, medication, or residential care). It dismisses subtle or mild forms of dysfunction as “normal” or labels them with fuzzy definitions that keep us guessing (e.g., “personality disorder”). When there is no clear line between normal and abnormal, we grow accustomed to “little things” that bother us assuming they’re just part of the human experience we have to live with and can’t do much about.

 Specializes in learned, psychological problems, and leaves organically-based, psychological problems for the medical field. Notwithstanding the fact that some mental and emotional problems are created by combinations of learned and organic causes, the vast majority are learned, i.e., caused by events that traumatize a developing mind.

 Is specific and has little use for generalities. It clearly identifies every learned, psychological problem, from very subtle to very serious. It also pinpoints causes and effects, examines all of its significant parts, maps a problem’s progression over time, presents clear remedial strategies, speaks in a language of fact and common sense, organizes itself for public use, works with combinations of symptoms and causes to see how they interact to create new classes of symptoms, and goes back in time to the original traumatic event to frame it in terms of place, circumstance, and causal agent.

 Establishes a standard against which to compare the psychological problem, i.e., how people would be thinking, acting, or emoting if psychological symptoms were absent from their personalities. That standard is individual, psychological excellence. When we’re the best we can be, we’re demonstrating the highest level of human thinking, emotion, and behavior—how Mother Nature designed our mind to work. Comparing and contrasting psychological weaknesses directly to psychological strengths gives us something concrete to work on, work with, and work for.

 Is willing to question itself, take criticism, admit when it’s wrong, and respectfully listen to any cohesive argument.

 Attracts innovative people who are motivated to break new ground, expand the production of reliable, working conclusions, and build upon them to challenge the status quo—all necessary criteria if we are to establish professional standards the public can believe in and live by.

 Organizes itself around a central/unifying theme. If one digs deeply into psychology’s research, or any related research (e.g., child development, neurology, or psychobiology), one finds a consensus of information that forms naturally around a unifying theme. A unifying theme is critical for making connections between isolated clues and facts, and tying them to the fundamental laws of psychology. This yields practical/hands-on conclusions that not only help us understand our social world, we gain illuminating insights into our personal world.

 Depends on the scientific method—a series of standardized steps that objectively examine an idea or physical phenomenon to identify natural forces, laws, mechanisms, or processes by which a phenomenon functions or exists. However, the scientific method is merely busywork unless the scientist is motivated to uncover working conclusions that reflect the real world.

 Most importantly, because of the above qualities, implementing both forms of prevention is a science of psychology’s most cherished responsibility. Primary prevention treats the developing mind so no psychological problems exist in the first place.

Secondary prevention treats already existing problems by pinpointing the underlying dynamics (causes and effects), by laying them out for the client to examine. Preventive, therapeutic, and/or management strategies are then applied to significant data that has been gleaned from the client’s past/traumatic experiences. In other words, the client is given a complete therapeutic package that explains the underlying dynamics of the problem, rates the problem in terms of seriousness, describes how he should be feeling if his problem didn’t exist, why he is suffering, what caused his suffering, and what he must now do to feel better. There are no unnecessary listening sessions where therapists passively wait for clients to utter potentially significant clues so they can be labeled and added to a list for therapists to mull over for months or years.

A science of psychology is a sea change in the field of mental health and politics because it finally addresses real problems about real people in real situations with hands-on, more coherent, guess-free explanations in a manual-like form that answers questions the way we want them answered.

Having said that, there will be resistance. Not all people are prepared to face private doubts or fears straight up, or see themselves as others see them. So when people pry, our impulse is to defend or deny, or say it’s none of their business. However, this universal need to conceal our inner world only exists because we’re not privy to some of the fundamentals by which the human mind works. Understanding these fundamentals frees us to share humanity’s common problems in the light of collective understanding.

A primary roadblock to collective understanding is the curious fact that there is no universal agreement as to what the psychological problem is or represents. This is a serious gap in our so-called Information Age that not only leaves us confused and suffering, it makes us vulnerable to people who prey on confusion and suffering.

Collective ignorance or disinterest surrounding our true psychological makeup is this political threat’s cue to freely exploit our psychological dysfunction with its psychological dysfunction, for example, by setting standards for how we’re expected to live, act, and think. In other words, these exploiters meld into our internal suffering worlds with seductive promises born of their internal suffering worlds creating a political world of human predators encouraging their “prey” to protect themselves from invented “evils” like capitalism or The Constitution if they just believe what they would never believe if they were not suffering, or exposed to daily servings of media propaganda.

Their mind-shaping skills are so refined, we don’t know if or when our cognition is being tampered with. Mind-shapers with more diabolical intentions take it up a notch to transform our beliefs, values, and attitudes and even cause cultural shifts that challenge cherished views of religion, morality, patriotism, and what it means to be an American.

These same people strive to give us a new identity, even though it is alien to our better nature, one we previously would have rejected outright before these mind-shapers got to us. Externally imposed transformations going on within our internal world are felt as so real, so empowering, some will fight to defend their mastermind’s superimposed convictions as if their lives depended on it.

So far I have been emphasizing political minds that live to control and minds that live to be controlled. There is a third category of the tyrannical, political mind that complements this dysfunctional duo. These are determined, humorless, highly focused minds that have been preprogrammed by elite, political mind-shapers to wallow in hate to service a political ideology dedicated to subjugating we the people by any means necessary at any cost for as long as it takes. This mob mentality is on a hair-trigger to react to whatever its cognitive handlers want and to get in the face of anyone who dares reject its ideology, or who merely disagrees. Simmering rage drives them to openly ridicule challengers up close with crude, political venom. They speak of tolerance, but tolerate no one who thinks differently. They romanticize “equality” while working for the day when everyone will be equally miserable. They speak of diversity, but openly reject critics, Christians and conservatives. They march against social ills, disrupt gatherings of nonbelievers, resist with extreme prejudice to any perceived insult, create discord, turn to violence, seek social and ethnic divisions, and work for an anti-assimilation culture in what once was America’s “melting pot” while screaming for social justice and against deniers of their “truths.” Fanatical cries of “racist” to every imagined insult ring hollow. They expect us to interpret their words of hate as justifiable in a hateful world.

Above all, they insist on being heard. Facts don’t matter. Whomever is harmed by their antisocial antics doesn’t matter. They simply want what they want—now. Holding signs, wearing body paint and masks, displaying emotion-driven symbols, marching together in heavily financed displays of social activism, and bombarding critics by talking over them with loud, angry arguments are meant to gain attention by shocking us into blindly submitting. They’re on a do-or-die quest to build a new world where injustice, racism, lack of diversity, unfairness, inequality, and old moral values shall forever be forbidden, and forgotten. This juxtaposition of working to build a pro-social future by trashing today’s world with antisocial acts and rhetoric is curiously hypocritical.

But they don’t see their hypocrisy. In their minds, doing whatever is necessary is the only way to transform America into their political Utopia. Nothing now stands in the way of these dreamy-eyed ideologues drunk on power to disrupt and destroy; therefore, they’re confident that nonstop hammering at public sensibilities will someday shut down all resistance. Social disorder sets the stage for creating opportunities to bring down the status quo so their imagined, Utopian world can emerge.

All of the above are antithetical to Mother Nature’s laws. We can’t escape them despite political attempts to replace them with man-made laws. However, for Mother Nature’s laws to play out as designed, we must be in control, notwithstanding the fact that early strivings to bring out our best are not under our control. They’re under the control—if we’re lucky—of psychologically healthy caretakers who protect us from physical and mental assault, and expand opportunities for us to learn, examine, test, and experience new challenges, but, most importantly, they allow us time and provide circumstances for us to organize our mind around moral guidelines that help us judge right from wrong.

Mother Nature designed us around a maturation process that She expects to be nurtured and protected by sensitive caretakers until inborn potential is maximized. Sadly, in most cases, these expectations are ignored, denied, dismissed, or replaced with willy-nilly interpretations of how to control the developing mind, not maximize its potential.

Maximizing human potential according to natural laws lies at the heart of human evolution, and good politics. Absolute control over the many so a few can live in opulence at the expense of the many is not in Mother Nature’s grand plan for human evolution; that’s a formula for human devolution. Nonetheless, human devolution is the unconscious effect/unintended consequence of every tyrannical experiment. Behind well-programmed displays of concern and compassion stands a political tyrant who is in a subliminal war with his people. To win over the collective mind so he remains in control, he declares war on Mother Nature so his future victims willingly reject fact and common sense for eventual political suicide. Bottom line: What Mother Nature gives us at birth is opposed to any political ideology or political movement that fails to empower the people. Government has no God-given right to interfere with our personal control, co-opt our drives for independence, or restrict inborn needs to excel or pursue happiness.

Biology is on our side. During our developmental period, brain and body grow from precarious states of dependency to more sustainable states of independence. This rush to individual independence is accompanied by internal urgings to improve the self, and achieve with all potential working together to reach its highest level of output. Don’t we already hope that our children are at their best? Don’t many of us strive to improve ourselves to find that elusive glimmer of lasting happiness?

Simply put, the goal of living is to follow Mother Nature’s laws. Achieving a true state of happiness is the result of lifelong quests that begin in the early years in preparatory struggles to become our best. Once an individual’s psychological gifts are maximized (optimized), everything subsequent to this preparatory stage of life falls naturally into place—all things being equal. Unfortunately, even a minor glitch in the mind’s processing during the early years will prove costly in later years. Traumatic experiences—mild or serious—disturb mental processing in corresponding degrees.

One feature of mental processing that is fragile to even the most subtle of insults is curiosity/motivation to learn. We’re born motivated to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. When interrupted by abuse, for example, motivations to learn are immediately, and momentarily, redirected to raw, reflexive, defensive, survival strategies. Here’s the danger: Depending on circumstances, motivations may never return to their original baseline of maximum passion to learn. When we admire fast learners, we’re actually admiring quality of parenting that produced minds with few internal or external restrictions where passions to discover, create, and innovate were energized and allowed to proliferate. Because psychological, defensive reactions were unnecessary, mental processes were free to succeed or fail. Success is a learning experience, but so is failure. Success shows us what works for us; failure shows us what does not work for us. We can only reach the state of wisdom when we experience and understand both.

Any threatened child can learn, but what is he learning? He is learning how to fight back, hate, seek revenge, escape, deny, or mechanically submit to avoid more threats. Replacing curiosity with raw survival strategies that cause unnecessary suffering for a lifetime is not what any parent, or society, wants for a child.

What does this have to do with politics?

When the child feels protected, safe, and is free to learn, he grows into a psychologically healthy adult who, with other psychologically healthy adults, form the source of political power that improves society on all levels. Ideas that the individual must be free to seek excellence of any kind, that he is master of his destiny, and that in him lies the source of political power stand in stark contrast to the “modern” idea that the individual must be forced into submission—for the “benefit” of all.

Whatever personal positives the psychologically healthy individual brings to build a better world, they are today being replaced, even condemned, by misperceptions that government is solely responsible for building that better world. Subtle political messages are telling us that the individual, with his irrational thinking, capitalistic greed, and runaway impulses, going off in all directions without enlightened leadership, will forever be scrambling, and failing, to build anything that resembles a better world.

With this threat’s political ideology viewing government as the source of everything good, and the free-thinking individual as the source of everything bad, political mind-shapers are driving messages into our American culture and traditions to build that “better world” on the backs of naive, dependent, helpless, amoral, misguided, apathetic, suffering, and psychologically and intellectually challenged followers who blindly submit to political elites they have been led to believe have reached a state of self-inspired wisdom far beyond the common man’s capacity to understand.

All of this was possible because this threat never had a nemesis pushing back. It does now; you’re holding it: a new, scientific psychology specifically designed to challenge its illegitimate brand of political psychology point for point, and then some. Now the ideological playing field of politics is level. Now your political beliefs, and votes, count. Your newly enlightened words will pierce endless arguments with a legitimate psychology specifically designed to cut through the nonsense.

The new psychology you will discover in this book draws sharp lines; all Americans must choose a side. Both sides will be exposed for anyone to examine and compare. A prediction: Expect political battles to end with certain and predictable results, i.e., one political ideology will clearly win; one will clearly lose.

Isn’t this what we the people of America are crying out for? Isn’t it time to stand up to meet anti-American attacks with fact-filled reasons why America is exceptional? Why not address today’s collapsing of American values and traditions with prescriptive strategies and clear-cut methodologies that directly challenge political masterminds hawking their shifting ideology anyway they see fit? Don’t good people deserve something better for saving America from itself than a different political point of view?

My above triad of political controllers, willful controlees, and angry, resentful activists railing against critics, and demanding blind obedience to their “enlightened” leaders, yields a tightly organized cluster of psychological symptomologies I will expose by identifying, classifying, and diagnosing them so you can apply them on the spot.

Without this new psychological expertise held firmly in the hands of every patriotic American, corrupt politicians will never cease to exploit us in ways we’ll never notice, much less understand. Morally-challenged politicians will continue to give us what they want, not what we need. We’ll keep hearing solutions reinforced by warmed over, well-rehearsed, political psychobabble. Politicians may take a second look at their bad law or regulation, but in the end spend more of our tax money on it with their “good” intentions.

Beware of the so-called good intention in politics; it’s like the fabled Trojan Horse, i.e., appearing unexpectedly as a perfect answer to an intractable problem—until time reveals its true purpose. In many cases, it exacerbates the very problem it was supposed to correct. Why? The good intention in politics may not be about solving anything. It may be more about politely walking away from responsibility, feeling good, generating good feelings in others, exchanging action for inaction, avoiding hard choices or standing up for what is right, dodging issues, exploiting opportunities to grab power or secure riches, bending to powerful donors or influence, gaining attention, escaping blame, dodging criticism, deceiving, controlling others, or bestowing moral values on the self to appear honorable.

Trapping unsuspecting victims with good intentions, smiley faces, happy talk, optimistic predictions, or false promises is an old but reliable ruse. Pedophiles offer candy or car rides. Pimps offer companionship, protection, money, and promised paths out of misery. Political exploiters differ in strategies, but the end results are often the same: give potential victims whatever they want so they, without question, eventually nod in the affirmative to their certain demise. Psychologically distressed people are the first in line to bend. Once they bend, they are doomed to live marginal lives clinging to their misfortunes trusting government to make them whole—someday.

This political threat to America treats us as if our individual survival drive is under government control, not Mother Nature’s. But then, why not? Who or what controls the individual survival drive is a subliminal conflict that has never been resolved, and therefore is open to any and all opinions. Few people understand it; fewer still warn of violations against it. This has serious political implications. America’s treating the individual survival drive as if government owns it is a green light for this threat to speak with authority about what we instinctively hold to be most important to our very existence. Reaching deeply into the mind to replace Mother Nature with government gives political elites unlimited power to openly create helpless/dependent lifestyles on a grand scale, and sell them as ideal human conditions. Promoting “values” of personal helplessness or chronic dependency is not only anti-American or anti-liberty, it is symptomatic of widespread, government sanctioned, psychological dysfunction flying in the face of every natural law that governs human self-preservation.

The above triad of controllers, the controlled, and their rage-filled enforcers is, of course, found in variations of one basic political ideology: Communism/Marxism and today’s liberalism. Like Communism, America’s liberalism seeks crushing, total control over America’s citizens. Unlike Communism, America’s liberalism cannot use brute force-at least not for now. It faces two obstacles: a free people with traditions that respect rugged individualism, and a Constitution written over two centuries ago to protect them from a political juggernaut like today’s liberalism.

As of this writing, we the people of America have a narrow window of time to save our republic. But, do we have the will? Are we up to viewing politics, ourselves, and others through a magnifying lens of psychology? Is doing anything of significance with psychology worth the effort? Finally, how can anyone seriously believe that liberalism can be brought down with one book vowing to expose it? On the other hand, consider the power of exposure, but not any exposure.

Liberalism is a century and a half old institutional attack on the human mind.

Therefore, it has powerful defenses readied against anyone or anything that dares question it. But it is defenseless against a legitimate psychology organized specifically for neutralizing its illegitimate psychology—the weakest crack in its defensive wall.

Liberalism inhabits a dark, subterranean world of the mind where chronically unsatisfied exploiters thirst for riches, power, influence, and public adulation in American politics. Expose that and liberalism collapses. Now the failed struggle to fight liberalism is no longer about what liberals say or do; it’s about who and what liberals are.

The fact that it took over a century and a half to expose this outrageous example of political madness is evidence of how little we know about the human mind, and how much we have to learn. It’s bad enough that we the people of America have been hoodwinked by a relentless political juggernaut on a quest to control everything in its path; however, finding that it has entered our private thoughts to twist them into ridiculous distortions without our having a clue is unconscionable.

That being said, we the people of America now have a bullet-proof strategy to re­ awaken the very values in the political formula The Founders gave us. Thanks to a science of psychology, we now see that their suspicions were firmly anchored in humanity’s better instincts. Freedom to pursue happiness as one sees fit is a God-given right no government shall dishonor with arbitrary interpretations of government-given rights, nor badger us with twisted interpretations of how the individual pursuit of happiness shall be re-directed by government to glorify itself at everyone else’s expense.

America’s internal political conflicts notwithstanding, some of them traumatic (e.g., the Civil War), America managed to stay within established boundaries of what it meant to be living in a country dedicated to protecting individual rights from an abusive federal government.

Now those sacred boundaries have been breached. American patriots are scrambling to preserve what they can of the many extraordinary gifts the Founders gave them. But look what challenges they face.

How do they resist a political enemy that has already penetrated the human mind so effectively that ever-increasing numbers of Americans are now rejecting values, morals and beliefs that once made America great? How do they challenge liberal concoctions of “correct thinking” that defy common sense? How are patriots supposed to respond to America’s new blind faith in a promised, perfect future where patriotism is no longer honored? What political strategies can break through liberal lies and misrepresentations? How does any American address the dark nature of liberal attacks on critics, liberalism’s hate, its intolerance, its chronic rage, its grievance mentality, its race­ baiting, and the widespread suffering liberals predictably cause?

At the present time, more and more of us are failing to internalize the significance of liberal politics running wild within political institutions once sworn to safeguard our liberties. We’re growing more receptive to the idea that we can spend our lifetimes dependent on government. Collective will to preserve America’s heritage is diminishing. Morality is no longer fashionable. Public apathy is the celebrated emotion of choice.

Ethnic balkanization is replacing assimilation. Racial divisions are growing wider and deeper. America’s future is left to those who are determined to transform it into a financially, militarily, and morally bankrupt shadow of its past, and a weakened player on the international scene.

America’s response is, to say the least, mystifying: Let a cabal of power-hungry politicians and obedient bureaucrats replace our God-given liberties with their “liberties”? Is America devolving into a country of the government, for the government, and by the government?

We often forget that there is a political movement (conservatism) dedicated to preserving America’s historical respect for itself. But where is conservatism today?

People speak of what they believe are conservative values, e.g., lower taxes, preserving property rights, individual liberty, a smaller and less intrusive federal government, protecting life in the womb, good fiscal management, a strong military, etc. Nonetheless, these values don’t seem to resonate enough for Americans to stand up for them in the face of creeping liberal domination. The cultural hammer of political correctness has already silenced most conservatives. Their objections to liberalism are turned against them as anti-American, sexist, racist, extreme, or mean-spirited.

Will conservatism eventually fade away? It won’t because it can’t. Faith is enduring even though conservatives fail to sell its virtues, let liberals define conservatism for them, fear being embarrassed by liberals because they are conservative, reflexively bending to liberal arguments, sheepishly submitting to media attacks, accepting blame for what they believe, and most importantly failing to highlight features of conservatism people would embrace if they only knew what they were.

Conservatism will never fade away because its true values are timeless, a constant in Nature, and therefore in tune with everyman’s best instincts. People striving to be their best instinctively find conservative values to be in step with their own efforts. Note what the late great prime minister of England Margaret Thatcher said, “The facts of life are conservative” (emphasis mine). In other words, conservatism is on the side of people who are struggling to do the right thing for the right reasons.

Yet the only option left to most conservatives is to respectfully disagree with liberals. But that will never cut it; neither will compromise for compromise’s sake, or nodding to promises that curry favor with voters. Frustration, weak objections, and silence seem to be the best conservatives can muster. But this is as it should be when we don’t understand the psychological foundation upon which conservatism derives its true values—precisely what is missing in today’s political discourse.

So we end up with conservatives quietly defending the family, morality, religion, and individual liberties and responsibilities thinking they’re just battling a political opposition they don’t happen to agree with while liberals are loudly disparaging the family, morality, religion and individual liberties and responsibilities knowing precisely what they want and how to get it.

Liberal values, if we can call them values, constantly change to synchronize with political strategies of the moment. For example, liberals love conflict and social chaos, but not within their own ranks. Consequently, each liberal mind is in lockstep with every other liberal mind. There are unspoken rules: Criticism of liberal ideology is not an option; objective analyses of the liberal mind and of liberalism itself, especially its dark history and devastating implications for quality of life, are off-limits.

Soon after America’s revolutionary victory, less enlightened leaders would have built their government on a representation of the very tyrannical power they replaced—like most military victors would have at that time. Instead, they transferred political power to the people.

Liberals speak as if they are giving political power to the people by empathizing with the little guy of America. Sorry, The Framers beat them to it long ago by giving the little guy his own power to live in a government of his choice, not in a government chosen by nameless others.

Liberals believe the little guy should have no say in who should hold political power nor be free to choose his own path in life. This slow but certain process of empowering an ever-growing government is working, and has been unstoppable.

The historical record is painfully clear: Whatever liberals wanted, liberals got. They have no reason to stop. Why would they? Who would stop them? Failure is no obstacle. Their gaze, focused like a laser, is on feeding a pathological optimism belying a deeply flawed, political premise: America can be remade into a perfect society if everyone would just stop thinking about individual liberties and quietly roll over to “enlightened” government command and control.

If we the people of American want good government, we’re left with only one option: conservatism, liberalism’s political nemesis. Yet as weak and ineffective as today’s conservatism is, some conservatives still sense an eternal power buried deep within the idea that political power must be held by the people. When The Founders looked to the individual for better government, they were not merely appealing to better politics; they were unconsciously appealing to something like conservatism that would establish a republic for virtuous, informed, and patriotic Americans who, it was hoped, would do the right thing. But The Founders could not, and we today are not, taking that deeper step into understanding why the people must hold political power. That will take a psychology able to weave itself into conservatism’s true values so that both can join to finally reveal how understanding who we are as individual personalities and what we are as members of a species is key to creating the better politics that actually creates that better world.

Without a union of psychology and conservatism fearlessly standing up to liberal ideology, why would liberals not feel free to attack and blame, obfuscate and lie, misrepresent and deceive, and embrace nonsensical ideas with little fear of recrimination? With nothing better to compare liberalism to, liberals feel no need to hide from the fact that they’re in it for themselves, and will spare nothing to punish critics.

Why then should we be surprised when liberals strut with bold and brassy confidence? They’ll criticize anyone while the slightest hint of criticism toward them immediately receives their wrath. Even suggesting that people are responsible for the effects of their own poor decisions triggers a chorus of liberal outrage.

Who could have imagined that the people of America would someday relinquish political power to fast-talking, political charlatans painting glorious visions of an impossibly perfect world? If nothing is done, these same people will someday wake up from their denial to view the wreckage they helped cause while sheepishly asking what just happened to their America.

What is the attraction to something so clearly diabolical as liberalism? Well, how else can one find lifelong power, influence, unimaginable riches, and the chance to stand in the limelight of fawning adulation from a cowed underclass? Therefore, liberalism is a present-day utopian dream for its powerful few, but a nightmare for its powerless many.

Why then do we the people of America not see liberalism for what it is? Looking at voters, is it disinterest, chronic ignorance, lemming-like responses, collective depression, a head-in-the-sand mentality, misplaced loyalty, or an overly optimistic view of the future?

Looking at politicians, is it a lack of moral judgment, low intelligence, incompetence, corruption, or cronyism?

No. If it were any of the above, results would be hit or miss. There is nothing hit or miss in liberals making laws without public input, spending taxes with abandon, rewarding their believers with lavish perks, dodging investigations into liberal scandals, weakening America’s military, smearing good names of political opponents, lowering the value of the individual to raise the value of the state, and telling us how to live while its leaders squander fruits of our labors living like greedy dictators drunk on ill-gotten gains.

Nothing is hit or miss in liberal activists instructing the chronically ignorant on whom to praise, whom to hate, and whom to vote for.

What is hit or miss in liberals calling conservatives “extreme” (racist, evil, bigoted, greedy, capitalistic, homophobic, misogynistic, etc.)?

Staying with the last point, liberals attach the word “extreme” to all things conservative. It signals followers to ramp up already simmering hate. Liberals live and breathe extreme. If they were not extreme, they wouldn’t be liberals. Consider what is extreme: promoting chronic states of human degradation or encouraging public apathy so America slides into moral and financial decay, even though the psychologically healthy response is to protect America from all diabolical “hope and change” ideologies.

Liberals call Americans who want to protect America’s Constitution “right-wing kooks.” Is this not extreme? Why are pathological needs to control for the sake of control not extreme? Purposely stunting social, intellectual, and psychological potential of America’s citizens for political gain, thereby leaving populations trapped in lifelong misery, is an outrageously callous, and demented, example of political extremism. What about liberal race hustlers promoting a divisive, racial animus for profit, or lying to the public at every opportunity confident that an obedient media will give them cover?

Whatever is reported to be extreme in conservatism doesn’t come close to what is in fact extreme in liberalism.

Notwithstanding the many extremes of liberalism, why do some of conservatism’s own believe that conservatism is extreme? A drum beat of anti-conservative messages and the media’s re-manufacturing of the news, along with no push-back from wimpy conservatives, helped, over time, to sour America’s perceptions of what true conservative principles and values represent.

We can’t look to America’s media for help. They’re of one mind obediently imploring us to stop questioning government authority while trumpeting faux glories of liberalism. The field of journalism has degraded into a pedestrian, self-indulgent, close­ minded, pseudo-literate cabal of slick propagandists eagerly standing in line to accept whatever political blood money is due them for protecting liberals. This is the media’s credo: Subtract what makes liberals look bad; add what makes liberals look good; speak as unbiased, moral arbiters seeking truth.

We can’t look to America’s educational system. Our youth is already in the ideological grip of a carefully engineered indoctrination machine no one dares talk about, much less expose.

Is it any wonder that liberalism is an expanding, world-wide, political movement deeply embedded in our institutions, in our culture, in our values, even in select interpretations of theology (e.g., government welfare is charity.) For some, liberalism is a religious experience. For others, it is a lifestyle. How else do we explain the fact that so many Americans are happily turning themselves into victims of political exploitation without a second thought? Are we reliving a common, historical tragedy where societies rot from within before they disappear?

Liberalism’s sinister intrusion into the grand experiment we call America, along with its apathetic, dependent citizens living by a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” mentality, are clear evidence of today’s political rot. We have politicians working silently under public radar acting like comic-book villains determined to rule the world. But their underlying messages are a slap in the face of every American: You can’t manage your own lives! Let enlightened masterminds guide you! Shut up and leave politics to us!

All this raises a seminal question: Are liberals crazy? There is enough craziness in their words and deeds to at least wonder about the quality of their mental health. We cannot dismiss mind-sets of people gladly trading their God-given liberties for government handouts as normal. Nor should we take in stride the fact that all liberals must think alike. How else should we label rage-filled ideologues railing against anyone who disagrees?

Let me rephrase. Is the belief in liberalism symptomatic of some kind of mental defect? Can we label these defects in psychological terms? What is the state of being crazy, or not crazy? Can this mental condition be prevented? What are its causes? Can we control its causes?

Granted, the word “crazy” isn’t an accurate definition of one’s true mental condition, but neither are terms like “psychological disturbance” or “defect,” “neurosis,” “mental illness,” “mental impairment, “mental instability,” “mentally disturbed,” “mental disorder,” “mental disease,” “behavior disorder,” “pre-psychotic,” “psychosis,” or “abnormal.”

Lacking accurate definitions, what other label than “crazy” best describes liberal symptomology? Everything liberals touch degrades into what is unrecognizable and broken, e.g., the family. After liberals reward unwed mothers for having more children than they can care for, they diminish the value of the father (Remember him?), and ignore the psychological harm the children must suffer for a lifetime. Hidden within the family’s umbilical cord to government is the fact that too many children of single-parent families are condemned to a marginal existence. Liberals—with a straight face—love to pontificate: “If it only saves one child…” Yet liberal policies continue to destroy lives of the unborn, and shorten lives of its dependent, helpless, and neglected followers.

As if on cue, many still view liberal corruption, and its lack of moral development, through rose-colored glasses. On the other hand, why not deny reality if the perks are too good to pass up? Why wouldn’t a psychologically compromised politician do whatever it takes to lure as many to his view of reality as he can if he is skilled enough to slip by public “watchdogs” to round up a majority of voters? We can’t blame crazy people for being crazy; nevertheless, we have no one but ourselves to blame for not recognizing crazy when it’s in our face screaming “Trust me!”

When all is said and done, how else do we label a political movement instilling hope that is never satisfied, fulfilling needs that are never met, compulsively seeking control over everyone, living by false promises, making sure the downtrodden stay down, ridiculing personal responsibility, denigrating American values, disrespecting America’s heritage, opening America’s borders to anyone, regulating how we think about gender, age, and racial differences, stifling individual freedoms and liberties, ignoring the psychological potential of its citizens, resisting government representation of its people, believing that our lives belong in the hands of liberal elites, making sure the government always stands above the individual, celebrating liberalism’s success in how it artfully shapes public thinking, making sure the powerful always gain more power, accumulating and keeping personal riches, demanding fawning adulation, embracing, and exploiting psychological problems, seeing everything in political terms, justifying anything that serves its purposes, denying the harm it causes its own people, turning self-sustaining, independent individuals into submissive, close-minded, obedient, dependent minions, coercing or buying politicians and the media to protect it, building political strategies around propaganda, rejecting the natural laws by which humanity lives long and happy lives, viewing collective helplessness, government dependency and chronic ignorance as social positives, lying, deceiving, twisting meanings of words to promise what it can never deliver, causing social chaos that leads to lifelong human suffering, and predictably ending up a curse upon any land it chooses to infect.

If liberals are not crazy, how are we to explain similarities between liberals and today’s certifiably crazy people? Some dysfunctional people destroy what they control; liberals always destroy what they control. Pathological control is common in crazy people; it is also common in liberal leaders. Some dysfunctional people believe they are omnipotent; ditto for liberal leaders. The pathological mind lives in a self-manufactured reality; that’s where liberals live. Crazy people tend to exhibit extreme behavior; liberals are paragons of many variations of extreme. Crazy people are self-centered; so are liberals. Then there’s this: Liberals far outdo crazy people in their motivations and capacities for ridiculing morality and religion, disdaining high achievers, hating the country they live in, and despising anyone who points out the positive roots that made America an exceptional political experiment, when compared to any other.

Examples of liberal craziness are legion. Liberals tell us that there are “benefits” to becoming wards of the state. Living as one of the faceless masses guarantees security.

Government will bring out our individual best. Liberals say the government needs more money. Freedom to achieve is what permits people to earn the very money that government receives; achievement, in turn, is dependent on individual excellence.

Therefore, shouldn’t some of government’s highest priorities center around protecting and promoting individual freedoms and liberties so individuals can be at their best to raise government revenue?

We can spend billions ridding a river of pollutants and still end up with a dirty river if polluters keep polluting. We can spend billions going through the motions of fixing problems as long as we ignore real causes. Didn’t someone define insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results? Applying this informal definition to politics, isn’t punishing small businesses with federal and state regulations, raising taxes to cover runaway deficits, condemning rich and successful Americans, expanding government entitlements, and adding more to the welfare rolls, and expecting greater economic prosperity, insane?

We find evidence of liberal craziness in its own words. Take the word “fairness.” Fairness and unfairness are concerns of the undeveloped mind. Children struggle with subtleties of fairness and unfairness until maturity; experiences eventually tease out the differences. Apparently, adult liberals struggle like children to define what psychologically healthy adults have already come to terms with in their youth. What does this say about liberals who see unfairness everywhere?

Liberals speak of tolerance but tolerate no disagreement.

Liberals love the word “equality.” What is equality? What kind of equality do we want? Life is full of inequalities. Which inequalities should we remove? Which equalities should we work for?

Equality of psychological excellence is the only equality that matters. When people are at their best, differences disappear, or become meaningless. Optimized people don’t care what a person’s IQ, ethnicity, color, height, weight, sex, or country of origin are when that person is moral, objective, is a critial thinker, is open to another’s point of view, is willing to compromise, is informative or interesting, is an attentive conversationalist or listener, has a good sense of humor, is fun to be with, or is a loyal friend. Optimized people are excited about living; they love ideas, and the people who produce them. Subtracting our best from the equality equation leaves us swimming in runaway interpretations some people are only too ready to supply.

There’s that cherished liberal word “diversity.” Liberals mock diversity by insisting that all people think like they’re told to think.

Try criticizing a liberal and watch the craziness flow. If a liberal is caught in a violation, other liberals look the other way. If they can’t look the other way, they justify the violation. If they can’t justify it, they blame the accuser, or deny a violation occurred. When all efforts fail, they cry unfair, bigot, liar, make outrageous accusations, smear critics’ motives, cast doubt on their integrity, ridicule their intelligence or values, and spread innuendos. When liberals empty their bag of political tricks, they rationalize them as necessary, appropriate, even moral, and act surprised that anyone would think their intentions are anything but honorable, and their words are anything but offensive.

A curious spin-off of liberal craziness is in their denial of the psychological laws that make us responsible for our own quality of life. One example is capitalism.

The natural/psychological laws that underlie free-market capitalism are in direct conflict with liberal ideology, particularly the idea that the individual must be free to achieve. Achievers put their faith in themselves, not government.

Free-market capitalism is the collective power of scientists, inventors, designers, CEOs, investors, engineers, entrepreneurs, management and sales teams, technologists, skilled craftsmen and motivated workers. Free expression of psychological excellence channeled through a smart business sense, a new invention, or a scientific discovery will make some individuals wealthy and powerful. Wealth and power may exploit natural resources. Results of excellence may be difficult to control, e.g., the automobile; nonetheless, advantages outweigh disadvantages. Thousands of people in the US die in auto accidents each year, but we don’t ban autos. Twisting natural laws to fit political agendas creates conundrums. What then do we reward? What do we condemn?

Let’s apply the above to a liberal community organizer like our previous president Barack Obama. He not only views capitalism as a financial threat to the world, he sees it as a threat to anything that permits individual excellence to flourish without government controls.

In his mind social order is established when an all-controlling government builds a humanitarian paradise where everyone happily relinquishes individuality to join in promoting universal love, equality, and fairness. Any interference is tantamount to standing for social disorder and un-American values.

A liberal’s choice to be a community organizer is unusual in America for it is symptomatic of a state of mind that views Americans as something other than what we are, i.e., helpless, exploited masses yearning for direction from a few enlightened elites. A community organizer assumes that opportunities are closed to all but the rich and powerful. We saw this distortion of reality in Obama’s determination to neutralize power of the individual (e.g., take away choices for individual healthcare insurance; blocking school choice)—except where government benefits.

The mind of the community organizer is organized around exposing and confronting imagined enemies who are seen as victimizers. Social order is perceived to be restored when society’s victims are united into a tightly-knit unit that obeys every community organizer’s demands. But first the organizer must re-shape the unit’s thinking patterns so it accepts the organizer’s words without question, and automatically resists anything to the contrary.

The organizer is protected from criticism. His followers will never criticize.

Targets of his efforts (e.g., a business, conservatives, critical thinkers, or any anti-liberal group) will; however, criticism from them is expected. In fact, criticism from his enemies is fodder for more propaganda. Deniability frees him to do whatever he wants; his fingerprints will not be on the chaos he causes. Now he can wedge himself between the powerful and the powerless without fear of reprisal to demonize the enemy his followers have already been programmed to hate.

Going to the extremes to demonize one’s fanciful inventions of opposition begs for objective analysis. Psychologically healthy people don’t demonize other people. This thinking has to be highly dysfunctional—apparently a criterion for a liberal who chooses to reorganize a community into a reconstruction born of his own imagination.

Curiously, the organizer is not a member of his group. He protects it, shields it, instructs it, provides it with resources, but does not identify with it. He prefers to stand between his group and his enemy like a wise, objective referee imbued with all the facts defending his ideology with moral righteousness. This makes him apart from, and better than, both. He is better than employers because he is righting the wrongs their employees are suffering. He is better than the employees because he can do for them what they cannot do for themselves.

In his mind, he is a good person. Therefore, whatever he does is noble, whether it actually benefits the group or not. He doesn’t have to produce anything concrete; good intentions are more than enough. He senses order in the struggle, whatever the outcome. He also senses order in his group’s suffering because he believes it is noble for The (liberal) Cause. That being said, he sees human suffering as a necessary but temporary condition that should help to magically bring forth a social paradise that finally erases all forms of human suffering.

Curiously, failure is also sensed as order. Failure proves that his enemy is a powerful, diabolical force that deserves stronger, and more sustained, condemnation. In other words, failure only motivates him to stay in the fight to call for more vitriol. Keep in mind that he is backed by people who see him as a kind of savior; “saviors” never fail, only falter for a time, or repair to a more defensive position.

Of course, any plan the liberal, community organizer envisions is the perfect plan; plans not of his vision are necessarily flawed.

His social unit views its community organizer as its last hope. A religious-like faith in him must reject aspects of reality. In other words, the people he’s trying to “save” are living in an imagined reality born of the organizer’s fantasies. Within this imagined reality, the organizer can create crises to invent new targets for his followers to despise.

President Obama spoke to us as if he was America’s superhero fighting corrupt and greedy adversaries. No one but he had the courage and determination to protect America’s helpless citizens from diabolical machinations of conservatives.

Obama’s enemy—every community organizer needs an enemy—is the wealthy.

This is disingenuous because Obama unashamedly cavorts with the wealthy, and is one of them. A common target of a community organizer is a business that promotes free enterprise. He sees it as a runaway manifestation of capitalism, and a seat of financial power not under the control of government. Therefore, it is a dangerous power controlled by an anti-government mind-set—a threat in every sense of the word.

But the community organizer senses true conservatives as his most pernicious enemy, not only because they represent the opposing, political party, he knows they are invulnerable to liberal psychology. Conservative belief in the power of the individual to strike out on his own to invent, create, sacrifice, learn, experiment, and develop one’s potential, is a belief Obama could only disparage, never challenge. Consequently, human instincts to live free must be blamed, shamed, disrespected, condemned, ridiculed, hated, pointed to as politically incorrect or un-American, and denied whenever possible.

What about President Obama’s style of governing as president? In one sense, he didn’t govern; he stood on the sidelines to throw political mud. More to the point: Governing was too risky; it made him responsible and exposed him to criticism. Actually governing documents one’s incompetence, true intentions, and pulls back the mask of the political superhero saving the poor and helpless. Compulsive campaigning temporarily removed him from presidential accountability while maintaining a good standing among his followers; it also regenerated opportunities for reenacting his previous role as community organizer, now as an all-knowing, federal referee stalwartly standing between America’s true believers and their political enemies.

How did he get away with it?

Get away with what? Who’s to know if no one exposes the above? The media won’t; they merely repeated and embellished what Obama said, and demonized anyone who dared criticize.

By standing aloof from politics, and shielded from criticism, Obama was free to shape minds of his followers, and disown mistakes and collateral damage. So removed from the rough and tumble of politics, he came off as a wise authority pontificating to dazzle followers, impress political peers, and threaten detractors.

Obama, standing aloof as president, never had to apologize. He, on one hand chastised political enemies while on the other hand told his followers how evil his enemies are, and how he had his followers’ backs. This magnificent crusader, in the eyes of his adorning downtrodden, was therefore free to do whatever he wanted knowing he will never be blamed for the misery he causes. Should effects of his political incompetence leak to the public, America’s media would immediately plug the leak.

Obama’s missteps—there have been many—will never register in the minds of his chronically ignorant minions as an error in judgment, political corruption, an effect of liberalism, or political malfeasance.

Some may admire Obama’s genius for standing on a self-made pedestal that protected him from the din of political conflict; nonetheless, it is nothing more than what any liberal, community organizer would do when opportunities fall his way.

One could make an individual, psychological profile of any liberal mind—what you’ll be able to do this after reading this book. For now, simply listen to a liberal politician. Pick up any newspaper. Watch any political talk show. Note how liberals avoid blame and deny responsibility, blur distinctions between causes and effects, blend cause-effect interactions to fit liberal talking points, and treat liberal mistakes as if they have no causes, take place in isolation, or just happen. Here are some examples: